In an apparent effort to get the public to stop paying so much attention to their tenuous connections to the traditional baseball experience and start paying more attention to them as a baseball team, the Chicago Cubs have spent the last while systematically eradicating everything that's even remotely attractive about them. First they laid out extensive plans to turn Wrigley Field into a sort of Philip K. Dick version of Wrigley Field by covering it with giant televisions and such. Now they've unveiled a mascot, Clark the Cub, who looks like nothing less than the product of a design competition held at a furry message board. Generally, pantsless anthropomorphic animals pull off a certain sexlessness that keeps them from looking like voracious predators; Clark, with his shirsey covering his allegedly sexless crotch, with his shoes only calling attention to his pantslessness, represents a disturbing new variation on the threat that has always loomed behind the Cubs' seemingly friendly facade. With his arrival, Wrigley will now be known to Midwesterners less as a green cathedral than as a house of nightmares through which a freakish, perverted bear will chase you, forever.